


There's the Mountain, Make it Move

by lollywillow



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Musician Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, homeschooled by christian fundamentalists castiel, the jukebox musical comedy romance that no one asked for
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:35:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29106435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lollywillow/pseuds/lollywillow
Summary: “This makes no damn sense. This is worse than the time traveling bunny man in Donnie Darko. This is worse than when you couldn’t tell if Agent Smith killed Neo or he became one with the Matrix or whatever.” Cas hasn’t spoken in a while so Dean looks up from the label he’s been methodically peeling off his bottle of beer. He’s just sitting there, eyes wide and unblinking. “Dude, why are you staring at me so much? I got a rash or something? What’s your deal?”“I don’t understand most of what you say,” Cas says with complete, horrible sincerity. Dean huffs out a mirthless laugh and slouches back in his chair.“So this is it, huh? For the rest of eternity I’m just gonna be stuck here, sitting in this gay bar with you annoying the ever loving shit outta me?”Cas cocks his head in that way that makes him look equally like a curious child and bird of prey. “Truthfully,” he says, voice perfectly, pleasantly neutral, “in terms of divine retribution, I think we both could have done a lot worse.”(Or: the deancas Russian Doll AU)
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	There's the Mountain, Make it Move

**Author's Note:**

> no I have not seen the vast majority of the show. no that will not stop me from writing novels about how dean and the gay angel are best friends in love.

At first, Dean thinks it’s some kind of joke. Or a hallucination. Or one of those nightmares you have with your eyes open frozen in bed. All he knows is that he’s driving Baby down a mostly empty road that leads somewhere out of the city, one hand on the wheel and the other propping up his head as his elbow presses against the window. It’s the wrong side of two a.m. and if anyone asked he’d say Zeppelin is on the stereo, but truthfully he hasn’t changed the station where Gladys Knight and the Pips are singing about taking the midnight train to Georgia. His fingers tap in staccato bursts against the wheel; he can feel his heart thrumming against the hum of the car and the blare of the trumpets. So he doesn’t look both ways when he gets to the intersection. So he’s a little late to stomp on the break when the semi-truck barrels right through the stop sign, hurtling straight at him. 

He’s not surprised. He doesn’t have time to be. The second he catches the headlights out of the corner of his eye the grille is already slamming into his door and Dean is spinning. 

There’s a moment between heartbeats, between one of the 100,000 he has in any given day and the last one of his life, where he tries to think something good. Glass shimmers in the air, into his hair, his face, his hands, and he wonders, distantly, what his last thought should be. His eyes drift shut against the impact as the Impala glides across the pavement, turning ass over teakettle while every window shatters and this red spray splatters the windshield, and he thinks that this is always a good part of the movie. When the rugged hero’s drawing his last breath and the enemy ranks are closing in and he grips his gun as best he can in one bloody hand because like hell he’s going down without a fight. And the audience is breathless, the women clutching their pearls, the men hard-jawed and intense, and Sammy next to him squirming around in his seat to hiss into Dean’s ear, not like this, right? I mean, he can’t just die like this, can he? His story’s all wrong if he dies like this in the end, Dean! But the Impala rolls once, twice, gas and steel and smolder and all the weight of the world pulling the car into a snarl around him and he wants to squint stoically into the distance, John Wayne the fuck out of his last moments on Earth, but the only thing running through his mind is fuck fuck fuck, no way it ends like this Sammy, please Christ, before he is nothing but broken bone and torn skin and stone dead––

––and then he’s blinking at himself. Staring into the mirror of Sammy’s downstairs bathroom, smooth and unscathed. The LED bulbs buzzing and the faucet gurgling happily into the sink.

*

It’s a joke. Or a fever dream. Or one of those really bad acid trips that makes people see demons and scratch at the walls until they tear their fingernails out. When he pokes his head out the door, he glances around a couple times to make sure there are no smoke monsters or little girls crawling on the ceiling. But there’s just people there––people chatting, people holding beers, people milling about Sam’s living room or hallway or what he insists on calling the goddamn foy-yeh. People he knows. People he just saw not three hours ago at the party. The party he left and is somehow right back at.

“So get this,” he hears a moment before his brother’s hand is slipping a fresh beer bottle into his own and leaning in to talk over the talk and the laughter and the music. “Mrs. Chambers is here and she’s grilling me about why the birthday boy’s been hiding all night instead of mingling with her granddaughter who’s visiting from Austin, and who she mentioned, several times, is very pretty and very single.”

Dean stares at him, open mouthed. Sam takes a swig of his cream soda and looks out over everyone’s heads, nodding absentmindedly along to the Three Dog Night song Dean had queued up earlier. He looks completely unrattled. Hair combed and brushing his collar, brows knitted in a little when he sees Bobby pick up one of his artisan pots from New Mexico to check for a price tag on the bottom. He looks––the same, the same as earlier, the same as when people started milling in for this stupid birthday party Dean didn’t want but Sam did so that was that. The same as the first time he mentioned Mrs. Chambers and her granddaughter (who Dean’s talked to Mrs. Chambers about before and who’s just about a decade too young for Dean, thank you) and he saw Bobby pick up the vase and it’s freaking Dean out more than he has the words to describe.

“What the fuck, Sam?” It comes out a little angry, a little demanding, but Dean thinks he’s entitled to a little snappishness. Sam looks at him, eyebrows drawn up in his oh really? face.

“What the fuck what, Dean?”

“What the fuck this,” he says, gesturing wildly around them. He slops a little beer onto Jody, who frowns at him as she passes into the living room. “Is this for real? Are you screwing with my head? Did you think it’d be a fun birthday surprise to finally convince me I’m totally fucking nuts?”

Sam huffs and makes his you’re acting like such a child unlike me, an adult man face. “I think thirty-two’s a little old to be throwing hissy fits on your birthday, man.” Dean just gapes at him some more while the song changes to I Don’t Wanna Know by Fleetwood Mac, and Dean knows the next one is going to be Creedence, and the next one is going to be Springsteen, and Ellen’s going to get a little too into Born to Run and try to get Jo to swing dance with her and the vase Bobby didn’t scoot back close enough to the wall is going to get flung to the floor and shatter into pieces. “Look, I know you didn’t want to make it a whole thing, but Bobby and Ellen wanted to come down to see you and I just thought it would be nice if––”

“Am I on drugs?” Dean demands. The condensation on the bottle in his hand is wet and cold against his skin; he clings onto feeling that like a rope in the dark. “Is that what’s happening here?”

Sam’s face immediately darkens and his voice gets almost too low to hear over the noise. “That’s not funny, Dean. If you brought something into my house––”

“No, that’s not––I didn’t––” and Dean immediately feels like shit, because god, of course he wouldn’t. “I’m just––I’m kinda freaking out here, man. Because I was just in the car, or I could have sworn I was, because you were honestly, no offense, kinda pissing me off with the whole trying to get me to have a good time thing, and Bobby kept clapping me on the shoulder and not saying anything mean, and there’s a lot of people here wishing me a happy birthday and most of them I don’t even know because they’re your friends you invited, so I just wanted a breather and I was headed out to clear my head, and then all of a sudden––”

“Okay okay okay,” Sam interrupts, and he’s making his real concerned face now, the one that’s just a little too scared for Dean’s liking. He grips him by the shoulder and steers him down the hall into the kitchen where it’s a little quieter. “Let’s get you some water, yeah?”

Dean lets Sam sit him on one of the barstools at the counter. He closes his hand in a vise grip against the laminate pretending to be granite while Sam tries to politely shoo some of his law school friends out the door. The song changes to Fortunate Son. A hysterical laugh tries to bubble up Dean’s throat. Sam sets a glass of water down and looks at him with his I am a very competent attorney who passed the bar a whole four months ago, please let me help you face. Dean tries to pick up the glass but the non-vise hand is still closed around the neck of a bottle. He’s still trying to figure out what to do about that when Sam takes it from him and says, “Time to talk to me, man.”

He takes a gulp of water instead. And then another. And then another. Five minutes ago he was dead. He was dead in the car that’s been his entire life since he turned eighteen and the paramedics were going to have to scrape him out of it with a spatula. He was dead and he felt his bones snap inside him and there was this nasty little jolt that he thinks was his neck cracking clean in half. Sam just watches as he drains the glass. When he sets it back down, his hand is shaking. In the other room Springsteen sings about his runway American dream while Clarence wails on sax. 

Sam sighs and spreads his legs out wider so he can rest his forearms on the counter. He does his Therapist Hands, cupping them together and using them to punctuate every sentence. “Look, I’m really sorry if I overstepped and you’re really not comfortable with this whole party thing.” Ellen’s in the living room saying, yeah, Jo, get your ass over here, and Jo is shaking her head with a smile. “I just wanted to do something nice for you. In three decades you’ve never had an actual birthday party. And now that things are finally somewhere approaching the neighborhood of normal, I thought it was time.” Dean’s staring at his brother’s face but he’s supposed to be sunk on Sam’s IKEA loveseat watching Ellen pump her and Jo’s arms back and forth while Bobby snorts in disapproval and Rufus from down the street talks at him about bullhead trout. But now he’s shaking in the kitchen while his brother gives him puppy eyes and says “I know how hard it’s been, and I sure haven’t made it any easier on you the past few years. I just want you to feel okay celebrating, Dean. Even if it’s just for tonight.”

“You should go take care of your vase,” Dean blurts, and Sam squints until there’s a shatter and a groan and a hiss of just shove it under the couch and Sam is up in a flash yelling “That better not be that vase that was on the sideboard, that’s an authentic Hopi healing pot––” and Dean takes that as his cue to slip out the back door and down the steps.

*

It’s some kind of––of mental hiccup. Or something. All he knows is he’s not getting behind the wheel for the rest of the night so he shoves his hands in his pockets and walks over an hour from Sam’s place in West End Park to his apartment. It’s not an apartment so much as it is one mostly renovated room above a garage. His bed is tucked into an alcove across from the kitchenette and the walls are striped in varying shades of off-white from the paint job his landlord never finished. It’s kind of a shithole, which makes Dean feel better about the whole thing. He hasn’t had a mailing address since he was about four years old. Having one now makes him feel like he’s up onstage forgetting the chords to the song he’s supposed to be playing. Like he’s stumbling through some performance he hadn’t realized he wasn’t ready for.

He wriggles out of his shirt and grabs another beer out of the fridge; he feels way too hot for someone who’s just walked miles in the January night. He collapses on the couch and takes a swig. He’s just stressed or something. All week he’s been out of sorts, ever since Sam called to tell him to ask for the numbers of the guys at the garage Dean’s been working at so he could invite them to the party. Dean had flatly refused and Sam had called him a self-punishing dick, and he’d hung up but the pit in his stomach had remained. And every day he’d woken up with that pit bigger and bigger inside him, growing until he stood outside Sam’s house, the squat red thing sitting on pilings with stairs wrapped double around the hill and the dark hole inside of him opened so wide he thought it could swallow the whole street. He leaned against the hood of the car and wished, probably for the eight thousandth time that day, that his Dad was there. That they were still on the road and that Sam was sitting with a book spread across the sticky bar and his hands over his ears in the din, Dad bent over the guitar in his lap and fiddling with the tuning knobs until the air buzzed around the strings just right. He closed his eyes and wished he was at a gig right then, just him at some dive bar where he could sit for three minutes and block out the world with a Guns N’ Roses cover because nothing bad happens so long as the music’s playing. 

But then Sam slid open the door and called out, you get back in that car and run away from this and I’ll kick your sorry ass, so Dean hauled himself up and nursed the same beer for three hours until he just couldn’t keep dodging people anymore. Until the only thought in his head was drive drive drive away and he did the only thing he ever knew how to do, kick the Impala into third gear and tear ass down the highway. 

Dean doesn’t realize his head is in his hands until his phone rings and he has to lower one to dig it out of his pocket to answer. Half-past eleven; he doesn’t even look at the name on the screen when he answers, “Hey, Charlie.”

“Birthday boy!” she yells, just as loud as the last time she called. “I’m so sorry but I was late getting out of work today and traffic was absolutely hell getting out of the city, so please don’t hate me but I’m not gonna make it tonight.”

“That’s fine,” he says, “but––”

“I’m pulling off and getting a room for the night but I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Can I take you to breakfast? Or make that brunch, actually. I’ll take you to the Jam Café, I’ll make you eat thirty-two biscuits. It’ll be awesome and you won’t hate me for missing your birthday.”

“Uh, Charlie,” he says. Rubs the back of his hand over his eyes. “Not to sound a little––but, um. Didn’t we already talk about this?”

“What?”

“Like, didn’t you already call to tell me all this? The Jam Café and everything? And I said, Charlie, if you don’t get your ass here and rescue me from this party on your white stallion I’m gonna pitch myself off the top of the tower, and you said, that’s so morbid Dean, and it’s very interesting to me how you’re the damsel in distress in this hypothetical––”

“Dean,” Charlie says, and he wonders if her face looks as scared as her voice sounds. “Dean, what are you talking about?”

“Doesn’t matter.” The heel of his hand presses hard enough against his eye to see bursts of white. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” And he hangs up on her mid-protest. Turns his phone off, ignoring the dozen missed calls and texts, and crawls under the covers in his Henley and jeans. For a long time, he lays awake. Stares at the ceiling and tries very, very hard not to think about anything at all.

*

Of course, he doesn’t see her tomorrow. At first light he thinks he might make it; the sun is reassuring, makes him feel like he’s woken up from some bad dream. But then he gets downstairs and realizes Baby’s still parked in Sam’s driveway and he’s hoofing it. This is fine, he tells himself. This is normal. Cars are rumbling down the street and hungover bridesmaids are squinting through sunglasses outside their hotels and are birds soaring above him and this is just a normal Friday morning after a normal Thursday night in the completely unremarkably normal life of Dean Winchester. He’s almost halfway to believing it, too, when his foot drops into empty space where the manhole cover should be.

*

Water running. Bathroom door opening. Bodies moving, music blaring. “So get this,” Sam saying. 

“Oh, fuck you, you––Loony Toons asshole.” He makes it almost two blocks before there’s a Doberman snarling in his face. His eyes make it most of the way through a roll before there’s teeth in his throat.

*

“So get this,” Sam starts, at the same time Dean says, “You got the number for animal control on you?”

*

Once he’s stood in Sam’s bedroom window and watched the guys from animal control sweep their flashlights over the whole neighborhood, he heads out. Turns his phone off because he’s tired of the same concerned calls and texts over and over again.

It’s a nice neighborhood Sam’s got here. A lot of big lawns and clapboard siding and bikes in sheds. It’s walking distance to Vanderbilt, which was good for Sam and his avowed mission to reduce his carbon footprint by walking everywhere. Dean had asked from a payphone in Tuscaloosa if he was sure it wasn’t just because he couldn’t pay rent and get a car because he was broke from Stanford undergrad, and Sam had hung up and hadn’t picked up the phone for a whole week. It drove him straight crazy, calling and calling and getting no answer. He knew Sam was fine, knew he was getting through law school okay, knew he was going to therapy and to meetings and that he wasn’t using, but Dean still felt that worry eating away at his stomach all three years he was in school. And then he came up for his graduation, and a nasty little voice in his head said you know how well he handles transitional periods, right? and even though he looked healthy and sounded bright and he moved in these beautiful, crisp, opioid-free motions, Dean just never got back on the road.

Anyway, it’s a good thing Sam’s got going here. Renting a whole house for cheap, new legal aid gig where he gets to save kids and lock up abusive assholes. Dean feels so wrong inside of it, like a b natural honking out of tune in the middle of Come Together. That had happened once, years ago, when he was playing the bass with Dad at some bar. His finger slipped and someone laughed and Dean had spent the rest of the night with his guts in a knot while his dad refused to look at him. He feels like that now, every day. Even the ones before the loop. Like he’s just waiting for something to snap, for the other shoe to drop right on his head. And now, he guesses, it finally has.

*

Ten a.m. Friday rolls around for once. Dean goes to meet Charlie at the Nashville Jam Café, sees her at a table in the corner. She’s cut her hair since he saw her over the summer; she’s half-standing, waving so vigorously she knocks over a glass. When he gets closer she scoots up and wraps her arms tight enough around his waist to bruise, and he scratches his fingers into the back of her head and says “It is really, really good to see you, Charlie.”

There’s almost no space on the table under the twelve pots of jam Charlie wanted to sample, crowded together in little glass jars in varying levels of gourmet pretentiousness. There’s a sickly bruise-purple blueberry/thyme/pine nut concoction he’s actually a little afraid of. Never in his life has he eaten a pine nut, and now doesn’t seem like the time to branch out.

For a while Charlie chatters about how Chicago has been, how boring her new job is, how close she is to getting past the firewalls in the NRA’s server. She asks him a lot of questions––how are you liking city life, is your new place alright, should we go to Hot Topic and get you some cool posters, do you like the guys at the garage, have you been seeing anybody since the breakup and in more than a casual sex way, is Nashville as fun as it looks on TV, do you think you’re going to settle down here––and Dean doesn’t really feel like answering. He just wants to watch her talk, her face so animated and her narrow chin bobbing up and down as she chatters. He just wants to listen to the sound of her voice. 

“To be honest, Charlie,” he finally says, “it’s actually been a pretty weird couple of days.”

Strawberry jam oozes out of her mouth as she takes a bite of biscuit. She wipes at it with an already very dirty napkin and says around a mouthful of dough and fruit and sugar, “Oh yeah? Why’s ‘at?”

“You got any special computer nerd thoughts on the subject of time loops?”

Of course she perks up like she’s a cocker spaniel and he’s just waved a slice of bacon at her. She swallows and says, “Oh heck yeah, dude. What about them?”

His coffee cup is empty so he reaches across the table for Charlie’s. “Just like––what’s their deal? Where have you seen them before?”

“Well, it’s a pretty big trope in video games––actually a lot of scholars say one of the reasons they’re getting more popular culture is because they’re so close to interactive media. Just like in a video game, you’ve got a character who has to move through the same environment over and over again until they master it and they can move on.”

Dean frowns. “You mean like they have to go on some deep internal journey and find out who they are or something?”

Charlie blinks. “I mean like you have to figure out the puzzle and get out of the dungeon in Legend of Zelda.”

“Okay, but. Outside of video games, what do you know?”

“Well I don’t know, Dean, it’s kind of a big topic. You know, I don’t just walk up to you and say, hey, car guy, what are your thoughts on––on––broken engines, or whatever––”

“Yeah, yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck. Glances around the restaurant but no one is paying attention to their conversation. Not that it would matter if they did, he thinks. “Well, let’s say that you’re stuck in one. A real you-die-and-wake-up-four-hours-earlier-in-your-little-brother’s-bathroom sort of time loop. What would cause that? And how would you get out?”

Spoons and forks rattle and as her hands slap against the table. She leans forward, eyes almost cartoonishly wide. “Dean Winchester, are you telling me that you’re currently enclosed in a temporal loop right now?”

He blinks. “Well. I sure do keep dying and coming back to 10 p.m. Thursday night.”

“Oh my god.” Charlie rocks back in her chair. She claps her hands together, looking inappropriately delighted. Dean scowls at her. “How many iterations have you done? How many times have we had this conversation? Have I given you the codeword yet?”

Oh, this is definitely annoying. “What codeword? Why are you acting like this is totally cool?”

“Ouroboros,” she says breathlessly. She pulls out her phone and starts typing notes inhumanly fast. “That’s the word I’ve picked out for if I anyone I know ever gets stuck in one, so they can give it to me and I’ll know right away. You said 10 p.m. Thursday? Do you know if there were any shooting stars over you just then?”

Yeah, no, he’s not doing this. He grabs the phone from her and she makes a whiny little noise of protest. She makes grabby hands for it. “Considering in a couple hours you’re not even gonna remember this conversation, I think I’m the one who should get the answers here. Where the hell did this loop come from?”

Charlie spreads her hands. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re in an interactive puzzle. Maybe there’s some reason why you’re stuck, some mystery you have to solve.”

Dean leans back until he’s wavering on two legs of his chair. Maybe he’ll fall and crack his head open on the floor. And then he’ll come to standing in Sammy’s bathroom again. “I’m stuck because my life sucks and I watched Groundhog Day way too many times as a kid. Mystery solved.”

Charlie bites her lip. “Well––do you know if you’re in a causal loop or a standard time loop?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Do things change from iteration to iteration? Or do you just do the exact same thing over and over?”

“Well, it starts the same. But then I, you know. Just do whatever. It’s Groundhog Day except there’s no rodents.”

She relaxes. The waitress comes by to ask if they need anything, completely unnoticed by Charlie. Dean shoots her a quick smile to signal that they’re fine. “Well, then you’re not in a causal loop. Nothing ever changes in those. So you still have free will; you can exert control over the outcome of every iteration.” A sigh rushes through him, a breath he hadn’t even known he was holding. “So you’re not in a 12 Monkeys situation or a bootstraps paradox. You are free to move about the cabin.” She pauses. “The cabin is the time loop. Because it’s small and self-contained––“

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. So get a little technical about the loop thing. How can I get out?”

“Well, I mean, from a coding perspective––a loop is just something you can use when you create a program. It’s one of the most basic tools you have. It’s when you have the program ask a question, and then it takes an action to answer or complete it. And then it asks again, and again, and again, running iterations until there’s no action left to take. And then the loop is done.”

He hasn’t had enough coffee for this. Maybe he shouldn’t have let the waitress go so quick. He scrubs both hands against his temples, surprised to find they’re trembling. “Okay, so I can just––satisfy this loop, or whatever? Find something to answer the question?”

“Well,” Charlie says, considering. Crossing her arms over her chest, she goes on, “I mean, there’s different kinds of loops, and how you satisfy it depends on what kind it is. You could have a for loop, which just runs however many times you set it to, or you can have a while or a do while loop where it just runs as long as your programmed expression is true or, y’know, false, depending, or you could have––” and she stops cold. Really gnawing on her lip now.

Dean leans his elbow on the table and whirls his finger in the air in a keep going motion. “C’mon, Professor Lightman. Tell me how to finish War Games. What else could it be?”

“It could be an infinite loop.” It rushes out in one breath and her eyebrows are absolutely writhing on her forehead. “Those happen when you don’t add a terminating condition and the program just runs over and over again. They’re usually a mistake, but––they do happen.”

For a moment he doesn’t speak. Now, for some reason, right this moment, it hits him: the stupid, absurd, awful gravity of what’s happening. Suddenly it’s not a joke; he died in that car crash and when that dog bit his throat out and when he fell down that hole in the ground. “Oh,” he says, and the sound he makes almost passes for a chuckle. That burning is back behind his eyes. He died and he’s going to die again, and no one in his godforsaken life seems to know how to stop it. Blueberry/thyme/pine nut jam doesn’t seem so fucking scary after all. 

Charlie’s almost put a hole in her lip with an incisor and she doesn’t look like she’s having much fun anymore. Dean’s hand is really shaking now as he grabs the last biscuit from the stack and slathers it in jam. It wiggles sickeningly in his hand. “Dean, look, I’m sure there’s––there’s definitely something you can do. I’m talking about coding not––not real life and there aren’t mistakes like that, there’s always something you can do––“

The jam’s as bad as he thought it would be, sweet and salty in a way that just doesn’t do it for him. He forces himself to swallow, heart hammering in his chest and heat exploding across his cheeks and the back of his neck. “Listen, Charlie, it’s fine. It’s really fine. I’m gonna figure it out.” He tries to shoot her a sunny grin; Charlie’s gone a little hazy so he’s not sure if he’s successful or not.

“Dean,” she says, urgent all of a sudden. Dean can’t feel his lips. Also his lungs aren’t working. This is a bit much for a panic attack, he thinks, until Charlie is shouting “Dean, Dean, you’re anaphylactic, what are you––you have allergies? I’m calling an ambulance, just––“

Fucking pine nuts, he thinks. He wonders if he’s just in a blip in the Matrix, running an endless simulation on the most emasculating deaths possible. And then his throat swells closed and he can’t think anything at all.

*

“So get this––“ Sam doesn’t even get the beer in Dean’s hand before he’s swatting him away.

“Just fuck off,” he snaps, and he stalks over to the couch to sulk until the universe decides to drop a piano on his head or something.

People still come by to try and chat him up and wish him a happy birthday. After a while of just grunting and moodily sipping a beer, people seem to get the message. Springsteen gets sprung from a cage on Highway 9 and the pot shatters. Sam stalks in complaining, “That’s an authentic Hopi healing pot––oh man, this was handmade––” and Jo flops down next to him on the couch. Her hair’s longer now than it was the last time he saw her. He wonders if he’s gonna ever be surprised by the length of anyone’s hair again. He had no idea how much he took the simple pleasures of life for granted.

“You’re sure in a snit for a guy who has all his loved ones together under one roof to celebrate his birthday,” she notes. He just grunts. “Seriously?” Another grunt. She reaches over to pinch the delicate skin of his side and he can’t swallow the yelp. “You dick. I drove in a car for fifteen hours with my mom and Bobby arguing over crusty old maps just for you to scowl at all of us?”

“You drove down to spend the weekend sneaking into bachelorette parties that are too drunk to realize you’re a stranger drinking on their dime,” he snaps.

She smiles, sunny and pleased. “I also came to sleep with as many shitty country singers I can fit into forty-eight hours. And I need you to be in a better mood for that so you can hook me up with all the sad sacks you do open mics with.”

“I don’t do open mics,” he argues, even though he absolutely does do open mics––because it’s Nashville, it’s almost weird if you don’t go out and do sad little shows to eight drunk people on a weeknight––and then Bobby comes over, perches awkwardly on the arm of the couch.

“You get this idjit talking yet?” he asks Jo, nudging Dean’s leg with his foot.

“Sorta. I started attacking his music career and, y’know, he’s never gonna let that slide.”

“Good move,” Bobby says, nodding sagely. Dean hates them both. He tries to sink down into the couch cushions. Maybe they’ll suffocate him and he can reset to the bathroom just to come out and have this whole stupid conversation all over again. 

“Seriously, kid, what’s the matter with you? I ain’t seen you flirt with even one of Sam’s cute paralegal friends. I’m startin’ to worry.”

They just won’t leave. Something hot and snarling mad is waking up in Dean’s chest. In a few seconds it’s going to be fully alert, sniffing the air for blood it can draw; Dean’s legs stretch and he’s standing, lumbering into the kitchen and out the sliding door, slamming it shut with enough force to let the people milling around in there know to mind their own business.

It doesn’t work, of course. He’s patting his pockets for a cigarette he knows he doesn’t have when Sam steps primly out of the house, pulling the door shut with a very pointed gentleness. He comes over to lean against the railing next to Dean. He nudges him with his hip. “Time to talk to me, man.”

Dean would laugh if the rage in his chest wasn’t unfurling out through his hands. He digs his fingernails into the wood and doesn’t realize he’s speaking until the words are out of his mouth. “I don’t want this. I don’t want this to be happening.”

And Sam––poor, long-suffering Sam––he sighs. Squints up at the sky, at the brighter starts that make it through the neon haze that’s always over the city. “Look, I’m really sorry if I overstepped and you’re really not comfortable with this whole party thing. I just wanted to do something nice for you. In three––“

“Stop, stop.” There are gouges in the wood where he’s gripping. It’s okay, he thinks; they won’t be there tomorrow. Or whatever passes for tomorrow. “Just––stop. I’ve already heard it.”

Sam sighs again. More annoyed this time. “I just don’t get why you have to be so––so shitty about this. Are you ever going to let me start trying to make things up to you?”

“You don’t need to make anything up to me, Sammy. This isn’t your fault.” And Sam doesn’t believe it, obviously, because he huffs and shakes his head, turning away. Dean’s staring at where his knuckles are white against the railing but he knows the face his brother is making. The whatever, Dad, I’m so tired of your shit face.

“I really don’t know what you want from me,” he snaps. “You come to California when I’m sick, you don’t leave no matter how much I tell you to fuck off, you drag my sorry ass to rehab twice––and then you move to Nashville to be near me? And you get an actual big boy job instead of playing gigs at every roadside bar in America? So I thought you wanted to be here, and I thought maybe you wanted to settle down––so why are you so pissed? Why are you acting like it’s some unholy violation that Bobby and Ellen and Jo came down? That I invited some people over? You think you’re inconveniencing them by having a birthday?”

Dean shuts his eyes. Sucks in one short breath, lets it out in a rush through his nose. “Don’t start this with me tonight. I’m not in the mood.”

“When are you gonna be in the mood, Dean? Tomorrow? Next year?”

“There’s not going to be a tomorrow, Sam,” he tries to explain. The rage is all the way down to his knees and his whole body’s quaking with it. It’s the energy he always tries to dredge up before he goes onstage; ever since he was fifteen and his Dad handed him a guitar and said, c’mon, kid, you play backup for me tonight, huh? and the terror exploded across his body bright and hot as a dying star, he’s thought, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is what’s gonna make me good. And it does; his hands never shake when he holds his guitar but they do when he’s washing the sweat off his face in the bathroom afterwards. 

“This is your problem,” Sam says. Dean still doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t have to for him to know Sam is pointing an accusing finger at his nose. “You are so terminally fucking negative.”

Dean swats the air in front of his face; sure enough, he bats Sam’s hand away. He opens his eyes to scowl at him then, trying to control his voice. “Well, Sammy. I sure am sorry I’m not handling this the way you would, with a big happy smile and a pdf of affirmations my therapist printed off for me––“

“Don’t,” he says. Low and warning. “Don’t turn it into a joke, Dean. You can’t do that after you spent a year begging me to get help. You can’t just turn it around like that.”

“Actually, Sam.” Bile is crawling up his throat and everything in his face burns and he feels horrible, unfeeling and unloving and undying. “I think I can do whatever the fuck I want these days.”

Sam just stares at him. It’s a new face he’s making; when he was puppy-faced and little he never looked at Dean like this. Like he’s not a brother or a substitute parent or a person at all. Like he’s some cheap coffee maker Sam totes around hoping it’ll brew something decent but always fucks up and Sam doesn’t know why he ever expected better. He doesn’t bother saying anything else. He just spins on his heel and goes back inside. The door doesn’t shut so gently this time. 

*

He cruises through the heart of the city for a while, just driving aimlessly. Drunk people stumble through the streets and his window is rolled down so he can catch flashes of music from the bars he passes. Trumpets wail into banjos which twang into thumping bass along one street. He still doesn’t know if he actually likes this city––it’s crowded and chintzy and the traffic is just the fucking worst––but he loves the music. Whenever he’s feeling a little too inside himself he can head out to any of the hundreds of bars or clubs, can pay a few bucks’ cover and slip inside and disappear into it. When he was real little, in the years after Mom died and it was just him and Sammy in the backseat of the Impala on long stretches of highway for days at a time, he used to get wound so tight that it was like his body was just one big knot. But when they stopped for the night, when he carried a sleeping Sammy into the motel room and Dad turned on the radio or strummed his guitar––the sound worked through him in waves, loosened him up. He’d lay on his stomach with his arms under his cheek to protect it from cheap, scratchy carpet, and he’d just watch his dad. Watch his big hands scribble lyrics and chords in his notebook. Watch his thick fingers flick over the strings, coaxing out sounds Dean would try to replicate as soon as he was alone with the guitar. He wouldn’t want to close his eyes, afraid to miss one of these moments where he could be close to John and actually feel close. He fell asleep like that more than once, and he’d wake up curled next to his brother in bed and his dad slinging whiskey and muttering to himself about rhyme schemes well into the morning. 

He’s parked by the Riverfront bus stop, forehead against the wheel. Now his dad is dead, and he is too, and there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do about either of those things. 

He makes his way out, over the pedestrian bridge. He wanders over it slowly. Mostly just people watching. It’s not real crowded at this time of night, this time of year, but he’s far from alone. Mostly college kids, buzzed or drunk off their asses. A few couples, holding hands, maybe trying to finagle a lock with their sharpied initials onto the thick metal beams.

When he’s about halfway over the bridge, he stops. Leans back with his elbows resting against the railing, just watching people pass. There’s a man next to him who looks like an even sadder sack than Dean, dark-haired in a crooked tie and a baggy tan trench coat. After about fifteen minutes Dean looks at him curiously; he hasn’t so much as twitched, leaning over the water with his forearms folded over the railing. He finally shifts a bit, adjusts his arm like it’s getting stiff; his jacket cuff rides up a little and a lurid pink wristband peeks out. Fun choice, Dean thinks; the guy needed a pop of color.

People come and people go. Dean wonders if Sam’s still pissed at him. Wonders if he’ll be pissed at Dean tomorrow, or whatever passes for tomorrow, and not even know why. Wonders if maybe he really did die in that car crash and now he’s just in hell, reliving one shitty night of his life for the rest of eternity. He pitches his head back to look at the stars through the metal lattice of the bridge. Asks the universe––the Universe the way Sam talks about it, this sweeping, sentient cosmic force––why it wants to watch him suffer. And he’s not proud of it, but he prays. Scrunches out his face real tight and says, God, or anyone, if you’re out there, I know I ain’t been too good thus far with the smoking and the drinking and the lying and the fornicating and the not paying taxes. But I swear, if you let me out of this, I’ll be good, I’ll buy a house and move to the suburbs and I’ll be better to Sam and I’ll call Bobby more just to check in. If you please just send me something, something good.

Of course, this is when a screech tears the air. There’s a harsh twang of metal on metal; he looks up to see the cables snapping like dry spaghetti. He sighs. Some screaming starts. A young woman clutching a much older guy’s hand wails; a swarm of college kids abandon their group pic and cling to each other, fall to the solid ground under their feet. The bridge starts to shake and there’s a lot of running, people shouting hot and panicked; someone treads painfully on Dean’s foot. He glances around, watching the broken cables wave ribbonlike in the air. The concrete vibrates underneath him. People are crying now. Dean scratches his nose. 

Next to him, the guy in the trench coat continues staring at the opposite bank. People have mostly stopped moving now, crouched low as the pavement rolls in surreal, solid waves. “Hey, dude,” he hears himself say. The guy doesn’t look at him. Dean reaches over to nudge an elbow against his arm. “We’re all about to die, in case you didn’t notice.” An elderly woman flat on her back against the roiling ground works her way through the Hail Mary in rapid, terrified Spanish. 

“Oh, that’s alright,” the man responds. His voice is deep, even-toned; almost serene. “I die all the time these days.” And he turns to look at Dean.

The sound in the world cuts out. He’s got some stock handsome Midwestern face, stubble over a strong jaw and cleft chin, but his eyes. His eyes are a clear, electric blue that shoots the volume down on the world around Dean, that shrink this moment to just the space between them. Dean’s fingers curl against the shaking metal behind him. For a moment, he doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t blink. He just stares, and he stares, and this man’s eyes stare unearthly blue right back until the world crumbles down around them.


End file.
